I’ve used zoom daily for my mental health practice for the past 5 years and not once had a glitch or issue. I speak to people all over the world and the video quality has been amazing. I use the meeting room function and let people in at their appt time. That way I don’t need to be setting up separate links all the time. It has been as perfect an experience as I could wish for.
Anyway, I’m wanting to move away from big US technology and have been trying various options:
kMeet (jitsi hosted by Infomaniak in Switzerland). Unreliable quality, stuttering, pixelated at times.
Signal desktop. Seemed good, but not so suitable for my purposes because no waiting room. I also need it to work for people using it in China and I’m not sure if it will.
Opentalk by Mailbox. Not bad, but not close to Zoom in quality most of the time. Occasionally it’s been good, but then I try it and the video freezes or is pixelated. Still, it’s better than Jitsi and has very good functionality, incl waiting room.
Nextcloud Talk (hosted on Hosting.de). Ok, but not consistent and no real waiting room.
Vsee. I think based on jitsi and ok video quality but never excellent.
Whereby from Norway (awful name). This is the closest in quality to Zoom. It really is very good and seems reliable compared to the others. BUT, I don’t like their login process for admins. No password, just email and then verification through a code sent to my email. What happens if my email is down or it gets hacked? Anyone could access the service and let people in to my meeting room. Just doesn’t feel safe. On the other hand, they claim end to end encryption. I like this one the best, except for the login method.
Can anyone recommend anything else? I’m really at a loss. None of these come close in overall experience to Zoom, though Whereby offers almost as good video quality.
Thanks. KMeet and Vsee I think are Jitsi and I can’t say they are particularly reliable unfortunately. Your other suggestion for some reason didn’t show up in your post — could you re-post pls?
Oh How did I not see that.
Hmm.
Try Brave Talk, based on Jit.si, could be better than the other jit.si instances?
Again if possible maybe self hosting one but yeah.
I’ll try Brave. I think I’m not up to self hosting. I could probably learn to set up, but I couldn’t fix things if there were problems and I need it to be absolutely reliable.
Have you tried the official Jitsi instance? I’ve had good experiences with it quality-wise, but unfortunately you need to login with Google or Github these days.
Professionally, I use galene and mirotalk. Both are vastly better than Zoom. Also mailbox.org offers OpenTalk, which also works better than Zoom.
The largest challenge is other orgs and their blocking of anything not zoom/teams. “sorry, that link is blocked by our corporate firewall” when trying to join my galene or mirotalk via links.
I think you still need to be a Signal user to use Signal on desktop for video calls - last I checked, that was the case. And OP needs people inn China to use it so don’t think that’d be possible.
Thanks for the tip - I tried the signal admin admission only function last night. it works well. but the video fluctuated quite a bit and was at tines very bad. Also, as the other poster said, Signal might be difficult in China — will need to check, but if it’s going to cause trouble for people it won’t be suitable. Strangely, Zoom has worked perfectly in this regard. not sure if the people i speak to use VPN or if Zoom has special Chinese servers.
Just had a thought about my signal test. I use a mesh network and I’m wondering whether the quality was affected by moving between nodes. Will retest later. Have you had good experiences with signal video calls?